by playback 45 the players refuse to play
On 27 October 2010 a man in Boston posts in a Facebook thread about the game the night before. Celtics and Heat, the season opener at TD Garden, Miami's first night with its new three. He is sure he saw a technical foul in the third quarter, Ray Allen and Chris Bosh, and his friends tell him there was no such foul, because on the broadcast there wasn't. He had it on his DVR. He uploads the clip.
The thread is gone by morning. The people in it are tracked down and given something to forget with. The DVR, a Motorola, ends up in a secure video archive at a site whose number is blacked out, filed as SCP-1733, with a note that playback is forbidden unless research requires it and that anyone who wants to study it has to ask a Dr. Geller. The box has been tested and cleared. Whatever is wrong lives in the recording.
That is the SCP Foundation setup: a fictional agency, a wiki of thousands of filed objects, each one written as a dry containment report by a volunteer. This one is by bbaztek, and most of it is a timeline. The game is played back, and each playback it drifts.
Playback 2, the crowd boos the Heat onto the floor and LeBron James shakes his head at them. In the real game he scored 31, Miami was held to nine points in the first quarter, and Boston won 88 to 80. None of that holds. By playback 15 the score sits at 0-0 for eight straight possessions and Glen Davis blocks a shot he never got near on television. By 26 Miami wins 112 to 85 and the crowd throws food at the Celtics. By 27 the commentators mention a feeling of déjà vu on air and cannot say where it came from.
Playback 34 is the one the file singles out. Both benches know the other side's playbook. Every set is read before it runs. Nobody scores until 3:34 is left in the first quarter.
Playback 44, the teams come out of the tunnel disoriented and the game is suspended. Doctors look the players over, and the players say they dreamt this game, all of it. The announcers say the same. The recording ends with the crew up in the stands, interviewing fans about their dreams.
Playback 45, nobody plays. The building files down to the court to work out where it is. The attendance figure is blacked out. They agree they are reliving one game, they try the exit doors, and the doors will not budge, so they start making tools to pry them. The file notes, in its flat way, that this is the last time the camera crew moves a camera. Every playback after it is one fixed broadcast shot of the floor, and the Foundation reads the rest of the story off whatever walks into frame.
Playback 51, the first violence. A group of drunk college-aged men in balcony section 318 beat an older man unconscious. Playback 52, he is back in his seat at tip-off, unhurt, like everyone else. At the 34:12 mark he clubs one of them to death. Playback 55, the crowd remembers the week they came from and the people waiting outside it, and no phone gets through.
By playback 65 there are factions. The players and coaches have barricaded themselves somewhere off camera. The sick and the parents with small children wait out each playback in the northeast balcony corner, under a championship flag draped over section 320. A group calling itself the Faithkeepers, Boston churchgoers and one other name the file redacts, has decided the arena is a punishment for consumerism and has been burning phones, car keys, handbags and wallets at centre court for four playbacks running. Playback 73, someone builds a bomb and sets it against an exit door. Three men are badly hurt and the door comes through without a mark, and the Faithkeepers gain members after that.
Playback 112, people jump from the balcony within the first ten minutes. The number is blacked out.
After that the file blacks out the playback numbers too. The Faithkeepers storm the locker rooms, sacrifice two starters, one from each team, and put the bodies up on the Jumbotron. The report records, dry as ever, that this had no effect on the recording. Next playback the two men are standing at tip-off, unhurt, remembering it. The preachers start asking for children. The other adults form a wall between them and section 320. In the last entry that survives, the arena lights go a deep red, and the data is expunged.
same place, same day, went the same way
Nobody inside has needed telling, from playback 45 on, that the court is the same. The ball goes up at the same second. The horn, the seats, the banners, the beer in the cup holders, all put back. What the Foundation's one camera is filming, playback after playback, is the single variable the loop leaves free, which is what the people do to each other with the time, and the file is a record of that going one direction.
Anyone who has replayed a night knows the furniture never moves either. The dinner, or the sentence said in a doorway, sits exactly where it was, and every pass through it the person inside tries a different door. They do not get better at it with practice. They get to playback 112.
The report's last sentence is the kind one. Due to the distress visited upon its inhabitants, testing has been suspended indefinitely. So the DVR sits on a shelf, and the people on it sit wherever the red light found them, and nobody presses play.
The kind thing was to stop watching. They are still in there.
The painting: Francisco Goya, A Pilgrimage to San Isidro (1819-1823), Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain.
The story: SCP-1733 by bbaztek, from the SCP Wiki, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. This retelling is released under the same licence.
Sources